If Measure UU has been approved, it would have removed an exclusion that allows an electrical plant owned by AES (Applied Energy Services) to pay no utility users tax (UUT) on natural gas. The UUT rate would have been 4.75%. Utility users in the City of Redondo Beach pay the tax but utility companies are exempted from paying it.[2]

Redondo Beach had previously tried to require that AES pay the tax through the courts. In 2008, a judge denied a lawsuit from the city that maintained that AES should pay it more than $65 million in UUT taxes that the city believed the utility should have been paying all along.[2]

Election results

Ballot question

Final version

The question on the ballot:

Measure UU: "To maintain essential city services, shall an ordinance be adopted amending the city's utility-users' tax to remove an exclusion that currently allows an electrical plant owned by a corporation to pay no utility-users' tax on natural gas, with annual audits, public review of all expenditures and without raising individual taxpayers' taxes?"[3]

=Judge alters question

Los Angeles Superior Court judge David Yaffe changed some of the Measure UU's language on September 8. He ordered that language in the ballot question that listed specific city services that might be cut if UU does not pass must be eliminated.[2]

A section of the ballot language that implied that "police, fire, improving stormwater quality and other general governmental services" could be cut was taken out. Language about a "subsidiary of a large corporation" was also removed.

First version

"To maintain essential City services including police, fire, improving stormwater quality and other general governmental services, shall an ordinance be adopted amending the City’s utility users’ tax to remove an exclusion that currently allows an electrical plant owned by a subsidiary of a large corporation to pay no utility users’ tax on natural gas, with annual audits, public review of all expenditures and without raising individual taxpayers’ taxes?"